Madly, I think I need to have your post bronzed. What an eloquent summary of what most of us believe we've found in this tiny company. Thanks for your efforts.
I've been mostly AWOL from most of my SI "duties" over the past several weeks, although I try to chime in on at least one or two of my holdings every couple of days. As you'll all see from the time I will have finished (EDT here, BTW), it's pretty late so I may ramble. Try to bear with me.
In reviewing the past week's posts, I noticed a few questions that didn't seem to get answered. Not surprisingly, they were all posted by the new guy in town, but I hope the answers will be of some general interest. So EQ and others, here you go: You asked why the time and sales report was posted on a day with no sales, when all it was was a few MM bid-ask changes. Simple: Several, if not many, of us keep tabs on the activities of the MMs daily on certain of our OTC-BB stocks. If you go way back on this thread to October 1997, when several of us first got involved with AVAL, you'll see lots of discussion of the MMs and tape reading all along the way. Actually, I personally do it with everything I follow, but when a stock trades as thinly as AVAL, analyzing the tape and the maneuvers of the MMs is an especially simple matter. I generally review time and sales on every stock on my watch list throughout the day on Bloomberg (others do the same on TOL) and match up the activity with a dynamically updating MM bid-ask screen, or at least the end-of-day snapshot. If I'm bidding or offering, which I often do on AVAL through various MMs to force them to keep the spread a little more reasonable or, obviously, if I'm trying to accumulate more shares, knowing the modus operandi of the MMs can help save a penny or two on the bid or offer, which makes a difference even on a relatively small block. Besides, with a stock like AVAL that seldom trades these days, watching the MMs gives many of us something to do [g].
EQ, you also asked "which business plan." Many of the people posting on this thread receive periodic private emails on AVAL, and I assure you that most of them know the key contents of the CURRENT business plan. That's the one that Jon Matz was referring to. Even many of the AVAL shareholders who rarely visit this thread know what's going on "unofficially" with the company, at least in the view of the email network administrators.
One last point: For those who are new to the thread or who may have forgotten, at least a couple of us have been privy to management presentations and have reported back to others of us. I, for example, met with Bernard, Ron, and another person who I perhaps shouldn't name. I looked into their eyes, asked them the toughest questions I could, and saw a demonstration of the new (at that time) X-po! kiosk that they had lugged up to my office. I came away from that meeting more convinced than ever that I was in on the ground floor of a possible major success story, a true potential home run stock, that was trading (or, actually, mostly NOT trading) at around a quarter. It's bounced around a bit since then, but it's still basically available for a quarter per share. I think every shareholder that I'm in contact with -- and I think there are close to 40 in the extended network -- understands that while there are no guarantees, opportunities like this don't come around too often.
One last note about Avalon management -- a number of people have been impatient and griped from time to time. I've done it too, privately. But what I always come back to is, I feel strongly that Bernard, Ron and the others are astute, honest, hard-working people, each with talents that complement the others' and each of whom (I think) has deferred some or all of his compensation and accumulated more frequent-flyer miles than he knows what to do with while trying to make the company successful for themselves and all of us. I also believe that they are truly decent human beings. Most importantly, although there may have been a bit of a learning curve in evidence over the past 10 months that I've been following the company, at this point I end every telephone conversation with, or piece of email correspondence from, Bernard Hicks or Ron Green feeling confident that whatever I inquired about is being handled entirely competently. Sure, they may be struggling against one obstacle after another, and success is far from assured, but I'm not aware of any better speculation. |
